There’s a fantastic idea powering Streams of Crimson, the first of four Tier 4 adventures for Season 7 of the D&D Adventurers League. The characters must recover a shard of the Soulmonger before the yuan-ti and Red Wizards do so, but they’ve got to navigate a ruined city in both the real and the ethereal plane. Having the adventure take place on two planes, with the characters experiencing different versions of each encounter area depending on the plane they’re on, is a brilliant concept.

The basics of the adventure are excellent. The encounters are interesting. There is the potential for role-playing, combat and exploration. If the balance of the combats occasionally seems off, well – that’s the case of every Tier 4 combat. The DM is always going to have to adjust them to fit the group. There is a significant difference between having one wizard in the group and having three. I strongly advise adding more opponents in a second or third wave if your players just meteor swarm everything and end the combat in two rounds. The scale of the maps – often at forty feet per square – is very large, however. If you’ve got a party with slow-moving fighters, they may find themselves getting very frustrated as they can’t close to melee.

I’m very appreciative of the “story beat” sections which describe what the purpose of each encounter is for the story’s overall arc. It’s also very nice to see that the Red Wizards don’t just attack mindlessly on sight. This is an adventure where some are potential allies and others are dangerous foes. The final encounter begins with a world-weary Red Wizard greeting the party with “Of course! Why wouldn’t adventurers show up now?” It’s a Red Wizard well in-tune with the genre’s tropes, and it’s glorious.

However, the adventure does miss one trick: There’s never a cross-planar encounter where the players need to be in both planes at once and are faced with foes in both places. I don’t feel the adventure quite lives up to the potential of the linked planes. Most of the material on the ethereal plane is standard: here’s more treasure or here’s an easier way past the hazard. And, although a few areas are “turbulent” and can throw the adventurers back to the material plane, there’s rarely much of a threat on the ethereal. It quickly becomes routine; I’d have appreciated a limitation on how often the Dendar talismans, which allow to the adventurers to access the ethereal plane, could be used.

These are the niggles that prevent me from considering this adventure “great”. It’s instead “just” very good. It’s not purely linear, and it offers opportunities for groups to approach it differently – a challenge for a Tier 4 adventure, as four hours is not a lot of time at that level to tell a story! Some optional encounters are presented in an appendix for those groups that have more time to experience the adventure.

Although it’s mostly very clear how to approach each encounter, I did find the encounter with the Orrery difficult to parse. It’s a complicated encounter, and it presents the material in a non-intuitive fashion. If you start with a description of the foes, then have a description of something not relevant to the combat, I don’t expect more details on the combat to appear on the next page! A paragraph explaining that the golems fight aided by the Orrery? That’d be nice!

This is a fun adventure, which should appeal to players. The DM is likely to need to adjust things to fit their party, but even if it doesn’t do everything I’d like, it provides a variety of challenges you don’t find in normal, lower-level adventures. Recommended.